in his wardrobe as Isabella takes in hers. Not long ago, he attended a party; given by Princess Michael of Kent, wearing a hat by Maurizio that consisted of six or seven thick, white hair braids that hung down to his chin, some in front of his face, from a tall white peak at the top of his head. Isabella is ambivalent about this new development. "It's rather fright- ening," she says. "I don't know if he's turning into a girl or what." She worries, too, that she and Detmar might be turn- ing into the Duke and Duchess of Windsor: she feels there might be some unhappy connection between an over- developed interest in clothes and being infertile (Isabella and Detmar cannot have children). "The Duke and Duchess were like two little toys," she says sadl)!. "They never had any children, so they just dressed each other all the time." Isabella likes to say that Detmar married her because she went with his house. Detmar's house, Hilles, in the Cotswolds, is an Arts and Crafts, faux- Elizabethan manor that his grandfather, an architect also named Detmar Blow, built just before the First World War. Blow was a disciple of John Ruskin and William Morris. He decorated the inte- rior of the house like a medieval castle, with tapestries, ancestor portraits, and pictures of kings and queens. Detmar's father used to rIde around the estate wearing a suit of armor. "It's a fantasy world," Detmar says. "Very dream)!, very pensive and theatrical." "It's like Madame Tussaud's," Isa- bella says. "My father described Hilles as Wuthering Heights on a withering budget. Detmar was livid." Isabella and Detmar take the train up to Hilles on weekends, and throw house parties at which they like to bring to- gether people who wouldn't otherwise meet. "One time, McQ:yeen was up there," Isabella says, "and I introduced him to Princess Michael. His dog did a massive poo in the corner, and I said, 'Ma'am, I'm so sorry about that poo.' Alexander said that his dog hadn't liked her and did the poo on purpose. But Alexander secretly loved her." Isabellàs family history is even more rococo than Detmar's. Her ancestors have lived in a castle in Cheshire since the fourteenth century: One ancestor, she says, fought at the battle of Poitiers and saved the life of the Black Prince; another sailed with Drake. When Is- abella's grandfather Sir Jock Delves Broughton inherited the estate, on the death of his father, in 1914, the family still owned thirty-four thousand acres, attached to Doddington, the family seat in Cheshire, and to Broughton, in Staf- fordshire. Mter the First World War, though, the family declined. Delves Broughton gambled and sold off large parcels of the estate to pay his debts; his wife, Vera, left him and departed for Papua New Guinea to take photographs and collect ethnographic specimens for the British Museum with her lover, Lord Moyne. (She was a cannibal, Isabella loves to tell people: she once, unwit- tingly, tasted human flesh.) Delves Broughton later emigrated to the noto- riously dissipated colonial community in Kenya, where, some years later, he was prosecuted for the murder of Lord Er- roll, who had run off with his second wife, in the famous "white mischief" trial. He was acquitted but was socially exiled nonetheless, and eventually com- mitted suicide. I t is hard to overestimate the extent to which Isabellàs aesthetic sense has been affected by her family's gothic history: She is obsessed with violence of a medi- eval sort-with armor and the color of blood and rigid headpieces and battles. She reads a lot of histof)T, and is haunted by certain figures, like Mary Q:yeen of . -----=-===-= ID\ Scots. Her favorite books are "Les Li- aisons Dangereuses" and "The Red and the Black." She has no love for novelty per se; for her, the new is exciting only when it is forced out of the old, already soiled with history and significance. Mter her grandfather's suicide, Dod- dington stood unoccupied, because her father couldn't afford to keep it up. When Isabella was a child, her family lived, instead, in a small cottage over- looking the estate. "I had beauty at a dis- tance," she says. "That was the frustrat- ing thing. I was brought up in a horrible lime pink house that Detmar never stops reminding me ot My father used to buy paintings :&om drugstores. Women weav- ing baskets. Noah's ark. It was really bad. I think that's where my intensity comes from-because I realized that every- thing was very ugly around me and I hated where I was living." When Isabella was in her early teens, her father met a younger woman on a bus in Hong Kong, and left his wife. Not close to either of her parents, Is- abella moved to New York a few years later to attend college at Columbia. After a year, though, a :&iend of hers was stabbed on campus and, her nerves shat- tered, she dropped out. She worked at American 1Iógzæ, Taller, and British 1Iógzæ. When her father died, eight years ago, Isabella discovered that he had dis- inherited her, leaving the Delves Brough- o u I "1 love a man with an untrimmed crust"